A senior official with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said today that the agency had not seen as of late morning any credible cybersecurity-related threats to “Super Tuesday” election operations around the country.

People in 16 states and one U.S. territory went to the polls on Tuesday to vote in primary elections that will decide candidates for national, congressional, state, and local elections in November.

“We do not have any specific or credible threats to today’s election operations,” the CISA official said, adding that the agency stands ready to assist with any security-related issues that might emerge.

Asked about some social media outages reported this morning on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms, the CISA official replied that the agency was aware of the outages, but not of any “malicious cyber activities” that would have caused them.

A Meta spokesperson today cited “a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services,” and said the company “resolved the issue as quickly as possible for everyone who was impacted.”

Speaking more generally about election security concerns, the CISA official discussed the potential of problems arising from AI-generated robocalls, ransomware attacks, and distributed denial of service attacks as areas of concern but did not tie any of those to today’s elections.

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John Curran
John Curran
John Curran is MeriTalk's Managing Editor covering the intersection of government and technology.
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